CARS- not the Pixar flick

I totally blew off the distance training this morning, lol. I am thinking that going forward I will just do the Monday and Friday swim workouts. Wednesday mornings are just way too much after getting home around 10:30 on Tuesday nights.

Ok, maybe it is just me but if I was President Obama I'd be seriously pissed off that former President Clinton got all the credit for bringing those two journalists home. I am sure the whole idea of face played a large part in the situation on both North Korea's side and ours. I briefly read headlines somewhere that the whole event was much messier than the press reported and Al Gore got totally shut out by North Korea- ha. That sanctimonious fool, I love it.

Ok, the CARS program. That is just a transfer payment system. It does not add $1 billion to GDP in any way whatsoever. $1 billion dollars also is relatively small to the total GDP of our nation. The idea that adding another $1-2 billion is going to lit us out of this downturn is absurd. All it will do is add to the further debt burden we are foisting upon future generations.

The whole furor of HFT just brings to mind the concept of unintended consequences. I agree that flash orders are wrong but I think killing off HFT will have serious unintended consequences. Let's assume HFT accounts for somewhere between 25-50% of volume. If you kill off volume, you also end up killing off liquidity. Once volume and liquidity get killed off they take a long time to come back. Once those two things disappear, brokerages start to die off again. I am not saying HFT needs to be stopped but I just look back to when we had specialists on the floor and they essentially had the equivalent of flash orders because they controlled the book. It comes down to who do you want giving you the reach around- an anonymous, diffuse crowd of quants or a person you can physically go to the floor and question?

The husband and I had dinner tonight. I could not make my classes at the dojo as we took our summer intern out for drinks after the close. It was his last day and I have to say this kid set the bar very high. He did an amazing job as an intern. He will go far in whatever career he chooses.